The next update is coming fairly soon

The most obvious change in version 1.7.3 will be the redesigned movie details view, which now focuses more on the backdrop images and usability. It’s much easier to get an overview of things now. You’ll find a screenshot of the redesigned interface in both landscape and portrait mode just above.

You’ll probably note that I’ve removed backdrop and actor details from the view, and instead added a couple of buttons that provide access to the same content. This is one of the benefits of the Analytics tracking, that I’ve told you about earlier. This allowed me to see that only a limited number of people are actually using these features, so there’s no reason for them to take up such a large amount of screen estate, when it’s not used very often. Pretty sweet, huh?

Other changes include options to sort by genre and availability (useful for the NAS users), support for additional naming conventions in TV shows, some bug fixes and perhaps also the new widget. I’m having some issues with the manual update button, can’t seem to get it to work. Might have to postpone it a bit. Also, I’m considering removing the built-in theme support. I think the default theme is pretty good, and removing theme support will make future UI improvements a bit easier. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Anyway, the update will be out within the next few days. I’ve got quite a bit of work to do first, though. Also happy to report that I’ve received a NAS device myself now, so I’ve got something real to test the upcoming network support on!

Update (10/28/2011): Not quite done with work yet, but it’s getting closer…

Hey Derek, thanks for the offer! There’s really not a whole lot of new functionality in this upcoming release, per se. It’s mainly some user experience changes, so I don’t think it’ll be necessary to go through beta testing 🙂